What is Information Literacy?: Digital Readers vs. Print Readers

           Modern electronic forms of information storage and retrieval are widely acknowledged to have revolutionized the way writers treat information.  Writing teachers are among the first to confront the consequences of these changes in the way they teach.  In the first decades of the twenty-first century, we are meeting the first generation of students who have grown up "plugged in."  Their most frequent reading and writing experiences after elementary school may have involved digital media rather than printed media.  Digital readers have not been exposed as often as print-taught readers to the conventions readers unconsciously absorb regarding the publication process.  These include page- and book-layout, press quality, and linear single-text apparatus like logically sequenced chapters arguing a single thesis, lists of primary and secondary sources, or indices of key descriptive or analytical terms and proper nouns.  Even the idea of a "document" be have to be defined for them.  Digital readers have no idea of the process by which the content of printed books and articles is checked for accuracy during production, so they do not look for it in digitally published information.

          Instead, digital readers tend to see information mediated through cloud-like clusters of single "pages," horizontally linked without linear logical hierarchy.  Information also often comes to them "un-sourced," without a named author whose qualifications often form one of the primary motivations for print readers' decision to read.  Instead, digital readers typically read a sequence of web pages from different authors of unknown quality because their web browser has selected them based on some algorithm the readers do not know or understand. 

        For these reasons, typical college freshmen no longer can be expected to treat hierarchical logical construction as necessarily better than what we might call "informational democracy," in which all data can seem equally important and quantity often is taken as an index of quality (e.g., hit counters, hit-based search algorithms, etc.).  They also tend to treat source authors "democratically," and they are slow to investigate source authority beyond the website's extension identifier (.com, .edu, etc.).  Finally, digital readers tend not to know what intellectual property is except when it involves something they want to take and the legal system wants to punish them for taking.  Almost all incoming college freshmen have illegally downloaded music, image, and video files, and nearly all of them have committed what a college instructor would call "cut-and-paste plagiarism" in the course of writing high-school papers.

        Incoming college freshmen especially need to be trained in "Information Literacy," though the effects of digital reading have affected every level of instruction in most disciplines, including graduate study.  IL is a set of skills and knowledge which will enable students to use digital and print media to produce their own expert knowledge by following the conventions which traditionally have governed print-based literacy in professional communications.  Adapting print-based conventions to digital media, and teaching students the rationales for those conventions, becomes a major new task for writing teachers even before the term "research" is discussed in class.

        If you are interested in some deep background on the controversial topic of "information literacy" and how it may intersect with our lives as teachers and writers, click here for a developing model of how research fits into the professional writer's life as a "cyclical" rather than a "linear" process.  This research-writing model builds upon the Flower and Hayes "Cognitive Process Model" of the composing process (1981).  Click here to see the F&H model and a short explanation of why it changed the faulty conception of writing as a "linear staged process" in the same way that the research process needs to be changed (i.e., it's not a linear pattern of research+write+revise).